"..The film portrays, quite
brilliantly, the nature of a guerrilla uprising.
Walker seems all too aware of the danger of a
popular uprising, when he cautions the white rulers
that "the guerrilla has nothing to lose." And that
in killing a hero of the people, the hero "becomes a
martyr, and the martyr becomes a myth." "
Amazon Review

“An
amazing film. . . No one, with the possible
exception of Eisenstein, has ever before attempted a
political interpretation of history on this epic
scale.” – Pauline Kael

'Queimada': Revolution In Perpetual Motion
- as long as there are
empires, there will be wars -
"Pontecorvo was an expert on the subject of revolution, possibly even the
poet laureate of violent change. An Italian
communist, he wore his biases plainly on his sleeve
and didn't let them prevent him from reaching
greatness, as he did in 1965 in
"The Battle of
Algiers," a movie so pungent in its realities that
the Pentagon showed it to Special Forces people just
last year... the movie Queimada is most
powerful as argument: It believes in the permanence
of revolution, and it closes on a shot of the surly,
bitter, seething people of Queimada, and in their
anger it sees a forever of violence. This is the way
it will go, he seems to be saying, and it doesn't
seem that he got that one wrong, unless peace broke
out in the past five minutes. It's brilliantly
constructed to argue what might be called the
classic imperial paradox: To win this war you must
make inevitable the next. The corollary is that as
long as there are empires, there will be wars. "

Queimada - Trivia The film's original
title was Quemada (the Spanish word for "burnt", as
the action took place in a Spanish colony. When the
Spanish government officially complained and
threatened a boycott of the film (objecting to the
script's supposedly anti-Spanish bias, Gillo
Pontecorvo agreed to alter the setting to a
Portuguese island and the release title became
Queimada ("burnt" in Portuguese).

Sir William Walker, a real historical
figure portrayed in the film by Marlon Brando, was
neither British nor knighted. Walker was an American
adventurer and his title of "sir" was one he adopted
on his own.

'Evaristo Marquez' , who plays
rebel leader Jose Dolores in the film, was not an
actor. He was a poor villager whom director
Pontecorvo discovered while scouting locations and
convinced to star opposite Brando. The studio had
originally wanted Sydney Poitier.

Marlon Brando once said this film
contains "the best acting I've ever done"

" Burn! was a courageous film for Pontecorvo to make. There
are few films as passionate or as uncompromising about the
real workings and nature of imperialism as a world order,
nor a film which identifies so feelingly with the victims of
neo-colonial rule. Not since Eisenstein has a film so
explicitly and with such artistry sounded a paen to the
glory and moral necessity of revolution. Even had United
Artists not attempted to sabotage Burn!, it would be a film
deserving wider viewing and critical attention. " Joan Mellen

Queimada -
Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!
- as long as there are
empires, there will be wars -
[DVD available at
Amazon.com]

"... The young boy who guards the
captured Dolores stays with him and provides Pontecorvo with
a means of allowing Jose Dolores to give his ideas
expression through dialogue. Jose Dolores does not assail his captor;
he tries to inspire and convert him. He tells the young man
that he does not wish to be released because this would only
indicate that it was convenient for his enemy. What serves
his enemies is harmful to him. "Freedom is not something a
man can give you," he tells the boy. Dolores is cheered by
the soldier's questions because, ironically, in men like the
soldier who helps to put him to death, but who is disturbed
and perplexed by Dolores, he sees in germination the future
revolutionaries of Quemada. To enter the path of
consciousness is to follow it to rebellion.....Pontecorvo
zooms to Walker as he listens to Dolores' final message
which breaks his silence: "Ingles, remember what you
said. Civilization belongs to whites. But what
civilization? Until when?" The stabbing of Walker on his
way to the ship by an angry rebel comes simultaneously
with a repetition of the Algerian cry for freedom. It is
followed, accompanied by percussion, by a pan of
inscrutable, angry black faces on the dock. The frame
freezes, fixing their expressions indelibly in our
minds.."

Gillo
Pontecorvo's Burn! must surely be one of the most
underrated films of recent years. This can be explained in
part by its involved and intricate plot which, on first
viewing, is difficult to follow.

Sir William Walker (Marlon Brando) soldier
of fortune, adventurer and an envoy of the British Crown is
sent during the 1840's to an island named Quemada. The
island was originally burned to cinder in the scorched earth
conquest by the Portuguese who claimed it as a colony- hence
the name "Quemada" which means "burnt."

Walker's mission is to foment a revolution
against Portugal among the oppressed peasantry with a view
to replacing Portuguese control with that of Great Britain.
He arms a peasant named Jose Dolores whom he first tests for
daring and bitterness. With a small band of followers,
Dolores, guided by Walker, robs the Bank of Portugal of its
gold and goes on to lead the struggle against the
Portuguese. After victory, Dolores discovers that the new
ruler of the island will be not himself, but a local
bourgeois named Teddy Sanchez.

Marlon Brando as Sir William Walker

Walker, having provoked peasant revolt to remove Portugal,
has organized the settler bourgeoisie, warning them that the
peasants will go beyond independence, demanding economic and
political control to effect social equality. The settlers
are used by Britain to protect British investment and her
access to Quemada's resources.

"Independence" is translated into
replacement of Portugal by a small settler ruling class
militarily supported by Britain. For the peasants, one
master replaces another. Their misery and powerlessness
continue. It is a prefiguring of today's neo-colonial
pattern.

Dolores is outraged by this cynical denial
to him of the fruits of struggle and he assumes the throne
of the former Portuguese Viceroy by force. But he discovers
that although he possesses momentary power, he lacks the
means to feed his people or to sell the sugar. There is no
knowledge of world trade or alternative markets. Teachers
and technicians do not exist. In short, his people are
without the very accoutrements of that civilization which
oppressed them in the first place.

Unable to see a way out and with sugar
rotting and piling up on the docks, Dolores steps down
reluctantly, allowing Sanchez to take control. But the
settler commander General Prada is quicker than Sanchez in
realizing that Quemada can be kept open to foreign
investment and bourgeois rule rendered secure only if the
rebels are suppressed and permanently disarmed.

Ten years pass. Walker, lacking apparent purpose in life, is
now dissolute and living on the margins of English society.
Jose Dolores again leads his starving people in a new
rebellion aimed directly at the landed settler rulers. This
threatens the entire structure of British economic control
with implications reaching further than Quemada. Such a
revolt, if successful, would spread through the Caribbean
and beyond.

The British turn again to Walker, hoping to exploit both his
knowledge of the peasant movement and his old relationship
with Dolores. He is asked to return to Quemada and put down
the rebellion. Walker accepts.

He attempts to contact Dolores, thinking to
trade upon their old association, but it is this very past
which has opened the eyes of Dolores to Walker, whom he
spurns.

Now openly the professional mercenary,
Walker pursues Dolores ruthlessly, burning half the island
while uprooting and killing people, animals and vegetation
in his path. He develops a theory that the guerrillas can be
defeated only if the peasants among whom they take shelter
and who supply them are burnt and driven out of all their
villages. The vegetation and trees must be denuded since
they too hide the rebels. The logic of defeating a popular
movement is inexorably genocidal, entailing total
devastation.

Dolores is finally captured and hanged,
refusing Walker's "offer" to escape. Dolores has learned
that freedom must be seized in struggle. And he knows the
offer to free him is designed to demonstrate his
subordination. He also realizes that Walker, having smashed
the rebellion, wants to avoid creating a martyr and a
legend. Dolores, in cool defiance, prefers death as his
fulfilment.

Walker is personally undermined by this
stark contrast between Dolores' satisfaction in moral
conviction and his own emptiness, which he only now fully
registers. The taste of victory is bitter.

His business finished, Walker is stabbed to death on the
dock by a porter a moment before embarking. Quemada's people
are awakened, emboldened, and irreconcilable. The camera
pans to many worn faces, their rebellion unchecked and the
example of Dolores burned into their consciousness.

The political aspirations of Burn! are
ambitious. Unlike
The Battle of Algiers, Pontecorvo's
earlier film, which takes the easier target of colonialism
and the desire for independence, without examination of
social formations or the political consciousness of the
F.L.N., Burn! recognizes that direct colonial rule is but
one form of control.

Without goals that go beyond mere physical
absence of the colonizer's army, economic and social
exploitation will be maintained for alien interests by
intermediaries, independent in name alone. Neo colonialism is
shown a far more invidious and clever enemy.

The powerful evocation of the dynamics of
America's practice in Vietnam, with its graphic depiction of
"Vietnamization," must surely be a major reason for the
critical skittishness towards Burns! in this country.

Pontecorvo has Walker make his next stop
Indochina on first leaving Quemada, a piece of historical
impressionism, since France and not England occupied
Indochina in the 1840's. It is a bitter irony when his
friend Jose Dolores, not yet awakened to betrayal,
innocently offers Walker a toast "to Indochina."

United Artists, as
Pauline Kael put it, "dumped" the film
without advance publicity and screenings. They made Pontecorvo change the occupier from Spain to Portugal,
presumably because the Spanish market for all United Artists
films was in jeopardy.

They made the English title of the film the
absurdly imperative "Burn!" rather than the appropriate
translation, "Burnt," which states the inexorable fact, thus
implying the film's endorsement of the tragedy it depicts.

Involved too is the crass sensationalism of
invoking "burn, baby, burn" of ghetto insurrections. This,
aimed at the black market, inverts the film's meaning, for
Portugal and Britain burned Quemada, not the victimized
populace, who would never call for the "burning" of their
own homes.

Burn! may have been buried because United
Artists doubted the film would do well, but the distributor
willed its unhappy fate. They were disturbed by the
incendiary nature of a subject with which they did not care
to be closely identified.

If Portugal and England were safer
destroyers for United Artists, the film's relentless
association of racism (the condescending attitude of Walker
toward Jose Dolores throughout) with imperialism brought the
theme even closer to home.
The Battle of Algiers, despite
its acclaim, had already suffered a distribution and
publicity blackout in the United States, and Burn! goes
deeper and farther.

Here, far more than in Algiers, Pontecorvo
explores Fanon's theme that through
long delayed and liberating violence the oppressed are
returned to self-respect and adulthood. After attacking
their first detachment of Portuguese soldiers, Dolores and
his people burst into an orgy of dance and song that lasts
far into the celebrating night. After generations of
passivity before abuse, they emerge as autonomous people. It
is entirely possible that there are circumstances in which a
company like United Artists might even be prepared to lose
money!

What makes Burn! more interesting than The Battle of Algiers
is that it raises those questions which Algiers, in its more
pristine detachment, evades.

The problem of what happens when a
revolutionary organization takes power in an over-exploited
country is hinted at in Algiers when
Ben M'Hidi advises
Ali
La Pointe:

"It's difficult to start a revolution,
more difficult to sustain it, still more difficult to
win it," but it is after the revolution that "the real
difficulties begin."

Burn! takes on this challenging theme. One
of the film's most subtle insights is that colonialism so
succeeds in damaging its victims that should they take
power, they have in advance been deprived of the means of
exercising it.

"Who will run your industries, handle your
commerce, govern your island, cure the sick, teach in your
schools?" Walker asks Jose Dolores, confident of his
superior position. "That man or this one?" he continues,
pointing contemptuously to the bodyguards of Dolores who
stand helplessly before him. "Civilization is not a simple
matter. You can't learn its secrets overnight."

Burn! is an intensely romantic movie, a seeming
contradiction given the relentlessness of its politics. It
opposes "Western Civilization" (an evil because it has been
racist and exploitative) to the purity of its victims, who
can see nothing of value in a civilization which forever
holds them down.

But the sugar cane cutters are the true
creators of the civilization which they reject as "white."
"We," declares Jose Dolores to Walker, "are the ones who cut
the cane." The labor which has led to great wealth is
subsequently denied its producers. That it could not exist
without them slowly dawns upon Dolores as a transforming
discovery. From this flows confidence and single mindedness.

Pontecorvo unfortunately makes a facile identification
between liberation for Quemada's slave descendants and a
rejection of "white civilization."

Because the vast wealth exacted by colonial
countries from the labor of their victims has given rise to
a flourishing culture, it does not follow that the arts,
sciences and technology made possible are themselves
hateful. The fact that white Europeans are associated with
this civilization accounts for the racism of the Europeans,
who must denigrate those from whom they plunder, but it does
not validate a racism in inverted form.

This is what Pontecorvo unwittingly does
when he allows Dolores to prophesy not merely the end of an
order which depends upon exploitation, but also the culture
which it has spawned. Since all culture has similar origins,
the sentiment casts the advocate of emancipation in the role
of destroyer.

But the burden of the film is to present
Dolores and his people as the carriers of a different
society, one which would end exploitation and create a
corresponding culture. It is clear that the accumulation of
capital, which permits technical development and a culture
requiring leisure, draws upon this labor. The social basis
of Western Civilization, certainly in its industrial and
technological phase, is traced in Burn! to its brutal
source.

The last words of Jose Dolores are meant to
taunt Walker with his obsolescence: "Civilization belongs to
whites. But what civilization? Until when?"

The words fall short, although they gain
power as the last statement of a man giving his life to his
deepest convictions. Because the film raises this idea
without exploring it, the source of the projected new
civilization remains obscure - as it must - for it is surely
destined to take the best of bourgeois culture as a point of
departure rather than retreat, if it is to be a culture
transcending the subjugation of one class by another.

Pontecorvo has said that "the third world must produce its
own civilization and one of the weaknesses of the third
world today is that its culture is not a new product which
has rid itself of white culture, but is a derivation of this
culture.'" But an emergent people will take what is useful
to them and build from there. In any event, no culture is a
new product. Such a view is hardly historical, let alone
Marxist.

And, Pontecorvo, after all, in describing the struggle of
Jose Dolores, projects not a "new" ideology but that of
Marx, who was both European and a product of European
capitalism and civilization. "Between one historical period
and another," says Sir William, readying himself for battle
against Dolores and the rebels, "ten years may be enough to
reveal the contradictions of a century."

Pontecorvo applies the words of Marx, as well he might,
since a new ideology is not required. Nor does Pontecorvo
care that Walker uses Marxist terminology and categories
before the Communist Manifesto was written!

Why then does
he, speaking through his characters, offer in the film a
blanket condemnation of all the ideas, values and
philosophies to appear in Europe since the Greeks? "If what
we have in our country is civilization," says one of the
rebels, "we don't want it." Yet in the next breath his ideas
are those of Marx and Engels: "If a man works for another,
even if he's called a worker, he will remain a slave."

These
contradictions permeate the film and engender not only a
certain feeling of anachronism, but a lack of intellectual
clarity, especially disturbing in a film which aims to
enlarge our understanding of the nature of neo-colonialism
and its relation to culture. There are other undeveloped
aspects of the film.

In the service of Britain, Sir William
Walker is ready to kill Jose Dolores when he threatens
British privileges and interests. But Walker feels deep
affection for the rebel leader who has played Galatea to his
Pygmalion. Indeed his fondness for Dolores is almost as
obsessive as his later quest to capture him, and, at the
end, Walker is shattered by Dolores' contempt. This is one
of the most potentially illuminating and subtle themes in
the film.

Walker's fascination with the vitality and
innocence of Dolores is in counterpoint to his frenzy when
he is rejected, even as the colonizers want the love and
approval of those they oppress at the same time as they
would destroy them for exposing the perpetrators to
themselves.

This allows psychological verisimilitude to
Walker when he returns to Quemada as a ruthless warlord who
will burn every blade of grass to prevent Dolores'
rebellious ideas from spreading to other colonies and
islands where Royal Sugar maintains interests.

A major
weakness, however, is that this ambiguity of response is
evident in Brando's performance, but inadequately developed
in the film. The problem is that the face of Brando easily
conveys irony and nuance. He is at his best when a situation
is ambiguous.

But the film seems to deny ambiguity when we
are expected to believe that Walker, without
self-examination, will renounce all humanity in the service
of an absent master- for pay so meagre it is not enough even
to be called "gain."

Psychological motivation required more careful delineation.
As it stands, in the middle of the film Brando, is unable to
carry the degeneration of Walker when he has become a
brawling drunkard. The action and melodrama, no matter how
many fires are set, is too weak to conceal the hiatus
between one aspect of the characterization, the external,
and the other, the inner life of Walker.

The bridge of a
psychological relationship between Walker and Dolores,
oppressor and oppressed, is not constructed. Pontecorvo is
himself too facile in accounting for Walker's
transformation:

"Walker changed because he discovered that
there was nothing behind the side he helped... Men like
Walker, full of vitality and action, then change the
direction of this vitality. They go to sea, buy a boat,
drink, beat people up. They don't believe in anything.'"

This is meant to explain why Walker returns to work for
Royal Sugar to rid the island of its rebels, i.e. to a man
empty of values one side is not perceptibly different from
another. But this reduces Walker to a cardboard figure, and
Brando is uncomfortable with the conception, imparting to
his Walker that very psychological nuance which the film
itself does not consistently fulfill.

Hence we miss in
Burn!, until the very end, that moment of self-confrontation
and discovery in which Walker registers his emptiness and
becomes ready to do anything.

We have instead his departure
to "Indochina" in one sequence and the sight of a slovenly
Brando in the next. There is almost a suggestion here that Pontecorvo fears that moments of psychological insight in a
film involve indulgence, a resort to what vulgar Marxists
might call "bourgeois individualism."

More the pity, because
the spectacle of personal damage drawn upon and inflicted by
imperialism upon its own adherents could only have made more
rich the portrait of deterioration in so bold and talented
man as Walker. Given the enormous resource Pontecorvo had in
Brando, he neglected an important opportunity to create a
character at once more powerful and tragic for being able to
see more deeply into himself.

As in Algiers, Pontecorvo used primarily non-professional
actors in Burn! Besides Brando, the only professional was
Rento Salvatori who plays the social democratic leader Teddy
Sanchez, an easy tool who is eliminated when he perceived:
"if there had not been a Royal Sugar, there might not have
been a Jose Dolores."

General Prada was played with wit and
aplomb by a lawyer, the President of Caritas in Colombia.
Mr. Shelton, the representative of Royal Sugar who
accompanies Walker during the last half of the film, was
performed by the administrator for British Petroleum in
Colombia. He played himself-convincingly and with ease. Only
in Evaristo Marquez (Jose Dolores) was Pontecorvo unlucky.

"...the native population scrounges for a living
on the waterfront. It is here that Walker meets
Jose Dolores, a porter who has learned that the
only way to survive in a white man's world is to
ingratiate yourself with foreigners."

In Algiers, Brahim Haggiag, an illiterate peasant who knew
nothing of movies, was metamorphosed into Ali La Pointe in
every gesture and expression. Marquez was also an illiterate
peasant who had never seen a movie when Pontecorvo met him.
He was chosen without a screen test because his face so well
suited Pontecorvo's conception of the character. But here
the attempt failed. Pontecorvo found that Marquez could not
turn or move on cue. A script girl had to tap his leg to
remind him of his next movement.

His part had to be played
over and over in the evenings by Pontecorvo and Salvatori.
Brando, out of the frame, would mime the facile gesture for
Marquez who was on camera, while Pontecorvo shot over
Brando's shoulder. Although Pontecorvo argues that after ten
days Marquez improved dramatically, the film is marred by
the unevenness of his movements and the unsureness with
which he speaks.

At one point during the shooting, when Dolores was being
coached in a completely mechanical way, Brando quipped, "If
you are successful with this scene, I know someone who will
turn over in his grave-Stanislavsky."

Unfortunately for Pontecorvo, Stanislavsky's rest was not disturbed. It is not
even clear from his performance if Jose Dolores understands
what the film represents as his ideas.

In the course of
Burn! Dolores must mature- from a man without consciousness
of his condition, completely unaware of the nature of his
enemy, to a seasoned leader who knows exactly "where he's
going," even if he's not always sure of "how to get there."
He is to emerge as a mass leader. But with Dolores, and
sometimes with Walker, motives and feelings are too often
presented in long shot. We do not in fact see what we are
told is before us.

Despite these weaknesses, Burn! is a beautiful film. It
shares many of the strengths of Algiers, but its historical
scope is far wider than the bare theme of independence from
an oppressor long condemned by history as obsolete. A
remarkable feature of Burn! is its truly cinematic style.

Pontecorvo interweaves his two great preoccupations, music
(and sound in general) with the imagery created by a
constantly moving camera. The result is not a tract against
neo-colonialism, but a ballet in which the dancers perform
in accordance with a scenario predestined by the exigencies
of a historical determinism.

During the course of Burn! the
visual style is altered with the changing fortunes of Jose
Dolores. Walker's arrival in the first sequence is on a
"painted ship upon a painted ocean." Birds chatter
peacefully overhead and the camera pans a lush, green
island. His second arrival, when his mission is to
exterminate Jose Dolores and the revolutionaries, is in fog
and mist, "under a cloud."

The terrain of the last scenes of
the film contrasts sharply with the first. All color has
been bleached out. The sky is not blue, but white. The birds
fly up to the sky to escape the smoke. Vultures predominate
as the screen is filled with bodies and there are only
blackened, charred trees. Pontecorvo demands of his camera
that it find visual equivalents for the emotions of his
people.

" 'Between one historical period and another,' says Sir
William, readying himself for battle against Dolores and the
rebels, 'ten years may be enough to reveal the
contradictions of a century.' "

But beyond cinematography, Pontecorvo uses sound, and
frequently music, to convey the themes of his films. He
admits to whistling projected musical themes on the set
during shooting to govern his pacing, to determine how long
to stay with a shot or on a face and when to cut away. Burn!
begins with a gunshot heralding the titles which force their
way onto a screen fragmented with stills from the film, one
giving way to the next, in a violence accentuated by red
background and music. The effect is of a film demanding that
its message be seen and heard.

The central musical motif of the film, that associated with
Jose Dolores, begins when the captain of Walker's ship
points out to him an island in the harbor where the bones of
slaves who died en route to Quemada are said to have been
thrown. The music thus is interested not in Jose Dolores as
an individual alone (he has yet to appear), but as a symbol
of his suffering people. In the same way Walker, who shows
Dolores' executioners how to tie the noose, ("See Paco,"
says the man, "this is how they do it.") personifies a
vicious culture, a role that will supersede his impulse of
affection and sympathy for Dolores.

Sound and image parallel each other as the thud of the plank
lowered for the passengers to disembark is followed by a
quick zoom back for a larger view of the wharves of Quemada.
Creoles await the ship in eager anticipation, while the
native population scrounges for a living on the waterfront.

It is here that Walker meets Jose Dolores, a porter who has
learned that the only way to survive in a white man's world
is to ingratiate himself with foreigners: "Your bags,
Senor," are his "smiling" first words. With a hand- held
camera Pontecorvo takes us on a tour of the market place of
Quemada, teeming with life, its bustle to be broken shortly
by the arrival of a gang of black slaves in chains.

"Walker changed because there was nothing behind the side he
helped... Men like Walker, full of vitality and action, then
change the direction of this vitality. They go to sea, buy a
boat, drink, beat people up. They don't believe in
anything."

Pontecorvo uses the zoom even more frequently here than he
did in Algiers, and often for the same reason, as a means of
conveying a rapidly changing state of consciousness in a
character. There is a zoom to Brando's eyes as he looks
through the bars of the windows at the funeral of the dead
revolutionary, Santiago, who, had he lived, might have
helped him in his plan to overthrow Portugal.

The technique
is also used with Jose Dolores as he lifts a stone against a
Portuguese soldier mistreating a female slave. To emphasize
the moment in which Walker sees Jose Dolores as a successor
to the dead Santiago, Pontecorvo freezes the frame. With
Pontecorvo the freeze frame is used as an equivalent to
musical punctuation. Just as a musical theme can begin and
then cease, only to start up again later, completing the
motif, the freeze frame can punctuate the visuals. At this
moment in the film the identity of Jose Dolores, and his
future, have been sealed by his act of attempted rebellion.

Equally, Pontecorvo attempts to use editing as a means of
thematic expression. He cuts from the bereaved wife of
Santiago to a vulture against the sky, as she carries the
body of her decapitated husband home. The vulture evokes the
rapacity of those who exploit the people of Quemada and who
murdered Santiago. Pontecorvo's editing style permits him a
good deal of foreshortening, especially useful in a film
with so complex a plot.

Walker teaches Jose Dolores and his
men how to use a weapon, concluding the lesson with the
words, "the rifle is ready." The rapid cut, accompanied by
percussion, is to a pan of the dead bodies of the Portuguese
soldiers who have been killed as a result. Pontecorvo very
frequently uses percussion, as in Algiers, as a means of
heightening tension and emphasizing the crucial nature of an
action.

For his close-ups Pontecorvo generally relies upon the eyes
of his people. He chooses actors frequently on the basis of
the intensity and expressiveness of this feature. The
close-up of the eyes of Jose Dolores as he is about to
attack Walker, who has just tested his metal by calling his
mother a whore, immediately conveys his fury. Close-ups
emphasize the tearful eyes of the children of Santiago
helping their mother to remove the body. They become the
tears of all those who have been made to suffer
meaninglessly.

Such moments are contrasted with those in which Pontecorvo,
using percussion, emphasizes the vitality and life force in
the oppressed which emerges when they actively take part in
wresting their freedom. After the killing of the Portuguese
soldiers, Jose Dolores and the men and women who have helped
him break into a dance. In his throat Jose Dolores echoes
the shrill cry of the Algerian women when they urged their
men to avenge the bombing of the Casbah.

Reminding us of the
earlier film, this scream from Dolores unites his struggle
with that in Algeria. It also provides Pontecorvo with
another opportunity to show that for people in
underdeveloped countries faced with colonialism and later,
neo-colonialism, the task is the same. The process of
self-liberation follows a similar pattern. Jose Dolores
dances with a baby in his arms, a frequent symbol with
Pontecorvo, expressing his sense that the pain to be endured
by Jose Dolores will be unmediated by success; it will be
for future generations, who must continue his struggle, to
achieve the final victory.

The defeat of the Portuguese in the film occurs all too
quickly. It is rather inexplicable that a military (and
naval) power like Portugal could be banished from Quemada
with so little struggle or attempt at reinforcement. On the
night of a carnival, the camera zooms in on the Portuguese
governor about to be assassinated, ostensibly by Teddy
Sanchez, but actually by Walker, whose role is epitomized as
he holds the unsteady arm of his co-conspirator.

Pushed out
onto the balcony to face the people, Teddy Sanchez utters a
whispered "freedom," displaying the timidity of his class
faced with mass insurrection. A waving flag of Portugal
appears mysteriously, providing the shot with rhythm and color- and Sanchez with the opportunity to tear it down.
This action gives him his voice as well. As he now yells for
"freedom!" the drums begin, expressing the restoration to
life that liberation grants the people of Quemada.

The sympathy of the director for Jose Dolores is revealed
most clearly in the music, resounding like a Gregorian Chant
and sung by a black chorus, which accompanies Dolores and
his army along the beach into the city. Because the music is
so flamboyant, Pontecorvo begins with an extreme long shot
of Dolores and his people, some walking, some on tired old
horses, most in tatters, and all in absolute silence.

Only
when they are more nearly within our visual range do we hear
the first notes of the organ which introduces the
composition. The effect of this music is extremely powerful,
if romantic. It succeeds, however, in rendering Jose Dolores
a beatific figure, possessed in his devotion of more than
human virtue.

To reinforce this transcendent quality of his
hero, Pontecorvo has a crowd of women and children from the
town run along the beach greeting Dolores. The scene is done
in silence with music alone, recorded, interestingly, by
Pontecorvo in Morocco. It sets off the more grandiose music
of the earlier moment. Smiling women with tears streaming
down their cheeks reach out for Dolores, as if they were
touching a god. Shots of arms, hands, parts of bodies,
children, reinforce the motif of an enormous collective
force converging like a wave in the struggle against
exploitation.

Pontecorvo also relies upon reaction shots to indicate the
political point of view of the film. Jose Dolores' face
changes effectively (and here Marquez seems quite adequate)
when he learns that Sanchez has been made President of the
Provisional Government.

But the best reaction shot in the
film occurs later, when a troop of British soldiers,
complete with Red Coats, disembarks from the ship that has
brought them to destroy the guerrillas. A baby-faced young
soldier, marching proudly along, perhaps on his first
assignment, smiles when he sees all the beautiful, richly
dressed women who have come to offer welcome. His smile is
slowly dissolved to an expression of extreme fear as he sees
the cold fury in the eyes of the men of Quemada - also
watching the scene on the wharf.

The shot of the arrival of
the British Army, marching through a crowd of waving
handkerchiefs and cheers, parallels very closely the
appearance of Mathieu and his paratroopers in Algiers. Both
scenes establish that imperialism will use all the force and
technology at its disposal to crush a rebellion aimed at
removing its economic domination of impoverished lands.

Because it reminds us so much of Algiers, the scene in Burn!
serves again to reiterate Pontecorvo's view that the
struggle of all these peoples is fundamentally the same.
Their enemy always behaves in comparable ways because the
objective of domination compels essentially similar
stratagems and values.

Jose Dolores survives in power but a short time. The
insuperable quality of the obstacles facing him is shown by
the tracking camera moving through the chaotic palace rooms
filled with debris, men sleeping on the floor, a howling
dog, and general disorder.

Dolores returns to the encampment
of his people while the musical motif which has been
associated with him is played, this time with pathos. The
scene is a tableau vivant; the people reach out to him as
they did on the beach. He smiles, but in his heart he knows
that their freedom, for now, will be short-lived. The motif
is again played with sadness when later, in a flashback, the
rebel army is shown throwing down its guns.

Pontecorvo attempts to use music alone to convey the reason
for Walker's return to Quemada. During a dissolute ten
years, Walker had left the British Navy to inhabit slums. He
no longer lives in keeping with the values and style of his
class. The scenes which take place in England look as if
they were filmed at the Cinecitta Studios outside of Rome.
They are unrealistic to an extreme, puffed with atmosphere
and fog, like Dickens seen through the eyes of Rebecca of
Sunnybrook Farm.

The credibility of the entire sequence is
saved only by the mobility of Brando's face when he is told
by the emissaries of the Royal Sugar Company, now de facto
ruler in Quemada, that he is needed. Walker scorns the offer
until he is informed that it has something to do with "sugar
cane." His face immediately changes as he remembers his days
with Dolores. Accompanying his wistful and pained expression
is the musical motif that we have associated with Jose
Dolores and which represents all that is cherished in the
film.

It is with this that Walker identifies and which possesses
him. And it is here, in failing to develop the personal
workings of his attachment, that the film appears arbitrary.
Suddenly, in the next sequences Walker becomes a hardened
mercenary who does whatever is necessary to preserve the
holdings of a ruthless and self-serving sugar company, not
caring what he must do as long as he "does it well."

We are presented a second time through the music with
Walker's ambiguity. And again music alone cannot carry an
entire psychology of character. On his return Walker sends a
message asking Dolores to meet him for a discussion.
Dolores' outraged emissary conveys the request (It will
later be answered with the murder of three soldiers). But
before this occurs, Walker, satisfied with himself and
relishing the opportunity to meet his old friend once more,
steps outside of his tent. He asks his sentry why he "isn't
in the Sierra Madre with the others." (The name immediately
suggests the "
Sierra Maestra" of Cuba and encourages us to
see in Jose Dolores a forerunner of Fidel Castro).

The
musical motif of Dolores once more envelops Walker as he
walks out to look at the sunset. It is one of his moments of
greatest happiness in the film. The music poignantly
expresses the yearning in Walker, but it undercuts our
belief in the mission Walker carries out so relentlessly,
despite his feeling for Dolores. The element of
self-awareness is missing and with it a means of integrating
Walker's ambivalence within a coherent depiction of his
psyche.

Pontecorvo uses no dialogue to condemn the soldiers, who
must burn all of Quemada to capture Jose Dolores and his
band of guerrillas. It is the music which judges them as
they evacuate the villages. Sometimes sound and image
overlap to increase the sense of irony.

At one point, as
people are being herded from their homes, we hear the words
of the next scene: Teddy Sanchez tells a crowd of starving
refugees, "You will know that it is not we who are
responsible for this tragedy, but Jose Dolores."

A moment
later a riot develops over the distribution of a cart-load
of bread and, upon orders from General Prada, the people are
fired on by the soldiers. A man of good intentions, the
social democrat Teddy Sanchez, who believed all could live
peacefully together under the rule of Royal Sugar as long as
"adequate wages" were paid, is superseded by the more
realistic General Prada who has known all along that Royal
Sugar and a contented population were irreconcilables to be
mediated only through the barrel of a gun.

At one point
during the evacuations, Pontecorvo tilts to a little boy
with his hands up. The "nota ten uta" or sustained note,
accompanying the image was written by Pontecorvo. He
included it in the film, as he says, "superstitiously,"
since Burn! was the first of his films in which he did not
collaborate on the music because only two months were
available for the editing.

Pontecorvo zooms in on the young soldier who captures Jose
Dolores to explain the willingness of young men in Quemada
to fight for Walker. One of Walker's soldiers declares he
hopes Dolores remains uncaptured because as long as Jose
Dolores lives, he has work and good pay. "Isn't it the same
for you?" he asks Walker.

The young boy who guards the
captured Dolores stays with him and provides Pontecorvo with
a means of allowing Jose Dolores to give his ideas
expression through dialogue. He does not assail his captor;
he tries to inspire and convert him. He tells the young man
that he does not wish to be released because this would only
indicate that it was convenient for his enemy. What serves
his enemies is harmful to him. "Freedom is not something a
man can give you," he tells the boy. Dolores is cheered by
the soldier's questions because, ironically, in men like the
soldier who helps to put him to death, but who is disturbed
and perplexed by Dolores, he sees in germination the future
revolutionaries of Quemada. To enter the path of
consciousness is to follow it to rebellion.

General Prada is persuaded by Walker that Dolores induced to
supplicate for freedom would serve their purposes better
than the creation of a martyr, his spirit dangerously
wandering the Antilles. Walker, his ambivalence surfacing,
does not want the blood of Dolores on his hands. The scene
in which Prada makes his offer to Dolores is especially well
done. It occurs three-quarters off stage.

We wait with
Walker for the news, but all we hear are the muffled words
"Africa" and "money," accompanied by a loud laugh from
Dolores which chills us, as it must Walker. The episode is
not shown because the film, in its admiration for Dolores,
has rendered the plan absurd from the start. Nor is the
defeated Walker shown at the end of the scene, although we
hear his words, "I'm going to bed."

"Walker is personally undermined by this stark contrast
between Dolores' satisfaction in moral conviction and his
own emptiness, which he only now fully registers. The taste
of victory is bitter."

The last interview between Walker and Dolores is powerful.
Walker desperately wishes to set Dolores free. Dolores
refuses to speak to him. The camera focuses on the face of
Brando who, having been superseded in his superiority and
moral strength by Dolores as a mature revolutionary, cannot
understand why a man would give up his life if he has a
chance to escape. Dolores has purpose and meaning in his
life. Walker by this time has none and only now is
confronted, looking at the transformed Dolores, by what
Pontecorvo has called "his own emptiness."

Pontecorvo has
described the shooting of this scene with great poignancy:

"
Walker is desperate when Dolores refuses. He sees his own
emptiness before his eyes. And we stopped one day for this
scene because Brando was afraid. It may appear very strange,
but Brando, because of his sensibility, after years and
years of sets, after years and years of success, is very
often afraid of difficult scenes, extremely afraid. And he
is tense and nervous when he is in such a situation. In this
situation he was not able to function. The dialogue was
originally longer... we cut out all the dialogue and I told
someone to buy Cantata 156 of Bach because I knew that it
gives the exact movement of this scene. And I cut all the
dialogue. Without saying anything to Brando, I said, we will
shoot now, we have waited too long, we will try to shoot. I
put the music on at the moment when I wanted him to open his
arms and express his sense of emptiness. I put on the music
without telling him. I said only, "Don't say the last part
of the dialogue." He agreed. He was happy to do this; he
said it was stupid to use too much dialogue. From this
moment he was so moved by the music that he did the scene in
a marvellous way. When he finished the scene, the whole crew
applauded. It was more effective there than on the screen
later. The sudden tension we obtained was surprising. And
Brando said this was the first time he had seen two pages of
dialogue replaced by music."

Pontecorvo zooms to Walker as he listens to Dolores' final
message which breaks his silence: "Ingles, remember what you
said. Civilization belongs to whites. But what civilization?
Until when?"

The stabbing of Walker on his way to the ship
by an angry rebel comes simultaneously with a repetition of
the Algerian cry for freedom. It is followed, accompanied by
percussion, by a pan of inscrutable, angry black faces on
the dock. The frame freezes, fixing their expressions
indelibly in our minds.

The music of the end is a religious
choral piece. Played over the final moments of life
remaining to Walker who lies in the dust, it becomes at once
an apotheosis, very moving and romantic, as it heralds in
victory the fall of the tormentor. The feeling left with the
audience is simultaneously one of horror and vindication,
although the actual murder of Walker occurs long after his
moral demise.

Far more than Algiers, with its virtual equation of the vast
violence committed by the French with that of the Algerians,
Burn! was a courageous film for Pontecorvo to make.

There
are few films as passionate or as uncompromising about the
real workings and nature of imperialism as a world order,
nor a film which identifies so feelingly with the victims of
neo-colonial rule.

Not since Eisenstein has a film so
explicitly and with such artistry sounded a paen to the
glory and moral necessity of revolution. Even had United
Artists not attempted to sabotage Burn!, it would be a film
deserving wider viewing and critical attention.